Electronic systems used in home appliance industry require compliancy of safety relevant norms, specifically norms related to safety-relevant signal handling (e.g. IEC/UL/CSA 60730).
Said electronic systems may comprise analog multiplexers in order to perform a time-dependent multiplex of a plurality of signals to a certain input of an electronic component, e.g. a microcontroller. Thereby, a plurality of signals can be connected to the electronic component which may provide a limited number of input ports.
In order to comply with the requirements of safety relevant norms, a common solution is to dedicate an input of each multiplexer used in the electronic system to a fixed reference signal. The reference signal may be a reference voltage having a preassigned value. By regularly sampling said reference signal the correct function of the electronic system can be tested.
A drawback of said common solution is that one input per each multiplexer is reserved for error detection. Thus, the number of available inputs is reduced and in certain configurations, further multiplexers are needed because of the reduced number of available multiplexer inputs.
Accordingly, there is a need for improvements of existing error detection methods in electronic systems in order to improve the utilization of the available hardware resources.